


Adrift

by MilkshakeKate



Series: Soundscapes [2]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Don't These Spies Have Work To Do?, Drinking, F/M, Flirting, Implied Relationships, Multi, Pining, Sailing, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-07
Updated: 2016-07-07
Packaged: 2018-07-22 03:38:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7418311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilkshakeKate/pseuds/MilkshakeKate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They have a whole week to endure this infernal heat. A sailboat on the Aegean should be adequate respite from the sweltering little hotel room, the intimate nights, the late dinners, the close dancing... shouldn't it? Gaby has a curiosity that has far from melted and, after a near miss and a cocktail or three, she's determined to warm things up a little.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adrift

**Author's Note:**

> Written alongside the [**Squeaking Sailboat soundscape**](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/squeakingSailboatSoundscapeGenerator.php?c=0&l=4071484821211925573700), but feel free to ignore entirely if you're not feeling it! Adjust as you see fit and enjoy! :)

Gaby doesn’t like to be told what she wants. When Solo withdraws a third Negroni from her snatching fingers, insisting that she savour it, she grabs his wrist to down the drink in one. The orange peel twist he’d slaved over falls onto the deck, and she smiles at him.          

He gives her a chastising little look and wipes his hand, drenched, on his trouser leg.         

They are floating in the green-blue Aegean on a bright white sailboat. They have anchored just far enough from the docks for Illya’s surveillance to go unnoticed, near enough to head in promptly undercover. It's almost sunset, but they’re far from being back on the clock. All this waiting, anchored yet bobbing on the swell of the waves, their work forbidden until morning… It’s limbo, and Gaby doesn’t like to take things by halves.     

Illya finishes coiling a rope, hooks it up by the cabin door beside her. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to your boat, Cowboy?”          

He’s softened by the heat but impatience bites at him just the same. The past three days have been unstructured, restless. Another day of strategic hanging around, a leisurely buffer. They’re foreigners arriving on the week of the island's harbour exchange, where shipping containers are sent and received en mas, laden with smuggled goods. An annual event, a black market affair, and they want to find the ringleader. Any local would rightly think their arrival suspicious. So they have arrived early to show their faces in the town, open and brash and pointing, to make themselves known as holidaymakers if they must be known at all.      

“Where’s the rush?” Solo smiles, angelic. “How about I stay the night? The weather’s fine enough to sleep right out on the deck.”         

“No. You will go to your boat. Cover doesn’t detail this form of guest.”         

“Of course. The honeymooners.” He swirls his own Negroni, cold and deep red all at once. “But of all the harbours in Europe, surely the Greeks would be most tolerant?”         

Illya huffs in distaste, but Gaby spots him. She has been looking for it, watching their back and forth with a hazy warmth, sitting forgotten by the cabin door. How small she can become when she needs to be. How transparent Illya is while he wraps up and buries whatever it is he and Solo have.       

He doesn’t snap. Illya bends under the flirtation, expecting it. Though aimless and eager to begin his work, he has opened up through the week behind them; a week of ease and warmth and light exercise, bright sun, good food, great drink.  

Perhaps he believes Gaby doesn’t suspect a thing between he and Solo, the mystery that it is. Feels he’s hidden it well. Or perhaps he’s only comfortable knowing he has had his taste and didn’t care for it — better yet, has tried it and, opening up like a vault under Solo’s hands, discovered that it isn’t all as depraved and corrupt as he’d once believed. There’s a thought, Gaby considers. One that simmers and promises.     

Illya turns to address a rope he has already coiled twice, finding something to do with his hands. “You sleep on the deck. I will lock the door. If rain comes, then so be it.”         

“Won’t you let me in?” Solo tries.     

“No.”         

“I could be the hound at the end of your marital bed.”         

“Yes. Dog. Disobedient, greedy dog. Fat and spoilt by leniency.”         

“Now, there’s no need to be hurtful.”         

And Napoleon, whose scent of cool, rich cotton and cologne would likely taste of sea salt in this heat, if he'd let her find out. Something tells her he would. He's game, Napoleon Solo. There isn't a beauty in the world he wouldn't steal away if it shone at him in the right light. Though asking to be stolen might lessen her appeal. The thief’s rush lies in the taking of something that can't catch up if he were to drop it and flee. She, unlike the rest of the jewels he hones himself on, will still be here tomorrow. And the next day, and the one after that. In theory, Solo should want her because Illya won’t let him have her. In practice? Well, she has seen the way he looks at her. She knows what she’s doing.      

The real challenge is Illya, who will not touch her.          

“We should sleep on the deck,” Gaby says. “I want some air.”          

Illya looks her over. “You are still nauseous?”          

“Yes,” she lies. The swell of the sea doesn’t dizzy her half as much as the drink, but it would be nice, she thinks, to lie under wrapped sails and open sky with the two of them. She couldn’t touch them in that clammy, closed heat of their hotel room. She had wanted to lie on the tile floor with Illya, with Solo, drink glasses and glasses of water as inescapably warm as their bodies.     

She couldn’t do it.   

It’s a stupid idea; one she never would have considered had this week not unfolded just so. With every day passing like a ticking clock, she’s had no choice but to consider how temporary they are to her. They’re only agents for hire, a trial. She’d like to figure them out before her assumptions can be tinged sepia tone by an expiry date; nostalgia and wishful thinking instead of bare fact. She wants something real from them, and quick, because everything else they give her is too slow.      

She can’t think of anything barer than this.       

“It will be very cold when the sun sets,” Illya tells her. 

“Then we’ll share the blankets,” Gaby says, and brushes into the cabin to find another maraschino cherry.    

She hears Solo murmur something into his glass, and Illya’s low, forbidding hiss in reply.           

          

    

Tourists. Aimless strolls between whitewashed walls. Blue shutters, cobbled streets and curling olive trees, sage green leaves scattering shadows over them like confetti.    

Olive oil and lukewarm salads. Wine. Lots of wine. Dancing slow in dark bars with Napoleon until closing time, her touch light under his lapel. His right hand politely weighing in hers, the other close on her back. Illya peering strangely over his glass, ensuring those last few inches of distance between them.   

Illya swimming in the saltwater lido by the sea, his broad and steady laps. She had stared at him from behind her sunglasses, but Solo had watched him openly, squinting under the sun with a fond little look she recognised. A blend of admiration and curiosity; a look he reserves for stealing things.    

After just four leisurely days with them — her fingers curled into the crooks of their elbows, her chair pulled out for her at every café — she wonders when it had stopped being their cover and became something they wanted.   

When did Solo’s twisting of her jewellery begin to linger just too long, his rebuke for resin and glue just too cruel to be sincere while gentling his fingers around her neck? When had Illya’s ordering her food for her – light and simple palettes, not the rich dishes of Solo’s taste — become less of an insult and more of an autonomous habit? Something that felt like a warm hand between her shoulders, like a small kiss?     

He gave her those too, though never where she needed them. Never how she wanted him, though her temples and her fingers did tingle and numb. Always for cover. Sometimes, when he’d leave her cold, she’d let that cover slip. Nothing ruinous; toying with the tie of a young waiter, the repeated absence of her costume ring. Illya’s grip would firm bruise-hard on her waist, mission compromised; enough reason to coat her with another layer of dark, warm paint. His mouth on her, anywhere, as if it made concrete that they were anything but spies. As if spies can’t kiss, touch, lean on one another, want each other.     

And then Solo would catch Illya’s eye, or hers, and propose they move on.    

Because a kiss from Illya Kuryakin is rarer than anything Solo has ever stolen, the thief has developed a childish habit of getting in its way. He has always suspected them, of course. He hasn’t interrogated Gaby, but he has certainly cracked into the shell Illya is building around her. Cracked it in his mouth like a fox a hen’s egg.    

Illya’s finest stealth work to date began in their Grecian hotel room not two days ago, when Solo’s eyes were closed.    

On the terracotta tiles, a sleeping patch between two twin beds, Illya had flinched under the brush of Gaby’s fingers over his shoulder. She knew he wouldn’t sleep through it. She only hoped he wouldn’t break her hand in reflex. But just tracing the round of him in the dark, lying on his side and showing her the brunt of his muscled back in the milky stripe of the moon through the shutters, the tousle of his hair, his crown... It was something of a dare.    

After a deathly stillness, Illya had pulled her palm over his shoulder to press a warm kiss there, breathe a sigh along her fingers, just for her. 

Gaby wondered if he’d been made a changeling in the night. The pulse in her wrist coursed and shivered as if the edge of that bed had been a cliff face, and Illya the crushing waves and razor crags below.    

It had frightened her, so she knew then that it was him.     

He released her, feigned sleep. Gaby tucked her hand back beneath her pillow to flex her fingers, feverish and hot, and wide, wide awake.    

     

   

Gaby stretches out on her front, blankets spreading over the deck and spilling down onto the bench below.  

The sun has been setting for hours and hours. Everything, even the warm air, is as golden and slow as honey, and the sea glitters like champagne. Gaby eats fruit, drinks gin, tears at the remains of a knotted loaf they’d bought inland that morning, and she thinks she could very easily get used to it all, now that she has an objective.           

Solo pours his ice cubes into her glass. He’s looking increasingly like a gondolier in his pale shirt and dark slacks, up there on his elevated plot of the deck. A sculpture, carved and shadowed and expensive to hire. He pops a black olive in his mouth and tongues at the inside of his cheek, frowns at her fondly for staring.          

It all feels so possible. She could reach out and touch. No smack on the wrist from Waverly out in the open sea. The only ones to punish her now are those she wishes would misbehave to begin with.  

One she can tempt. The other, the loyal, will need some work.             

The wind blows stray hairs around Gaby’s face, whipping them into tendrils. Heavenly. She pushes her sunglasses up so he can catch her looking if he wants to. The blanket scratches, and the juice of her nectarine has splashed the weave with deep amber droplets. With another bite the slide of more juice rolls down her arm, and she catches it with her mouth.             

Illya stares.             

Gaby flashes her eyes at him and rests her cheek in her hand. He looks away, so she flings the pit of her nectarine over his shoulder, where it plunks into the sea.   

He ignores it.  

Solo reclines beside her, legs outstretched and ankles crossed. He leans in to steal another olive from her platter.    

“Have you ever earned anything in your life?” she asks him.    

He considers this for a while. “How does one earn an olive, Gaby?”   

“One says please.”   

“Bitte, Fraulein.”   

She glares dully at him, plucks one from her plate and holds it out to shut him up.    

Solo takes it between his teeth. He lies back, cushioning his head on his arms, and rolls the olive around his mouth. “You know, Gaby, I could get very used to this.”    

“Don’t,” Illya interjects, shaking out his strained hands. “Tomorrow you will be alone.”    

Solo ignores him. “Please,” he says to her instead. It’s low and sincere enough to make her search him, to frown for it.    

Gaby looks to her diminishing pile of olives, shining at her like jewels. She picks one up for herself, eyeing him. “So you really are a dog?”   

Solo reaches out to thumb at the trail of nectarine she'd missed, still streaking down her wrist. Without truly understanding why, she allows him to slide his touch all the way up her arm, slip the olive from her fingers.    

Illya stands taller, avoids their joint measuring stare in his direction. How odd he looks in summer clothing, she thinks. White shirt and rolled up slacks just like Solo’s. No shoes or socks. And how sun-pink the tips of his ears now, and the high planes of his cheeks.    

What has changed?    

By night, Solo had paced the tiny hotel room like a caged tiger. It has affected her. Leaked over his edges and tainted her. Likewise, Illya’s watchful silence has become her habit.    

Gaby pushes her plate away, her feigned nausea suddenly very real for the rush of something else fluttering in her stomach.  

She thinks of Illya’s patch on the cold tiles between her bed and Solo’s. _Who had been the dog then?_ she wants to ask. All three of them padding about in bare feet, showering twice a day to rid themselves of clean sweat. Their ambling walks by the water, their sitting in comfortable quiet together in the blistering sun. Their single sheets on sensitive skin, the blinding white knife pleats of the shutters — the people passing by those windows, luring Solo to lean out to catch a glimpse of any body but his own, but hers, but Illya’s. He had been struggling too, in his way. It absolved her a little for this senseless, foreign ache.       

But has all of this strain been for them, or is it only the sultry haze of a Mediterranean mid-summer? Could she have wandered into town and bedded some handsome dockworker, gotten over it? Something about this dry heat brings a new awareness of the body, of sweat and touch. She can’t even imagine skin on skin in this warmth, lest they all melt. She wonders if Illya and Napoleon, like her, had showered so often only to have a moment of distance, of privacy, of release.        

With the last peeking of the sun, the shadow down the dip of Illya’s back is begging her. It’s him. It has to be him. She looks at Solo, whose eyes, again, are closed.    

This is what a slow week can do to her.          

She unfolds her arm until it hangs over the steps down into the cabin. If Illya turns to go inside, to leave those knots he’s so infatuated with for just one second, he’ll have to duck around her. Maybe she’ll brush over the flat of his stomach, the oblique cuts of his waist. She’d seen them when he’d returned from his showers, and again when he’d reached up often to pull at the sails. A whole stretch of muscle and skin. Shadow and warmth she wants to press into and roam over, trace with her fingertips until she knows them like winding roads, like the back of her hand.      

She wears a white dress over her bikini, and she has seen him looking.          

He does turn then, squinting at her from the corner of his eye as if she’s a mirage. He blinks at her outstretched hand.          

“What is it?”          

“Come here.”          

He eyes her, and Solo too. “Feeling okay?”          

“Yes. Come here.”          

He does. She had expected the walk down death row, the march to the firing squad. He usually adopts such a gait when he expects cruelty from her. He always comes when beckoned.         

But this is close to a walk reserved for a drunken Solo; nonthreatening talk and familiar company. She’d last seen it when all three of them were tipsy on their first night here. He’d returned from the roadside bar with a tray of medicinal espressos and, at the sight of a seagull stealing Solo’s entire lamb kabob, she’d heard Illya laugh aloud for the first time.           

Under his weight, the wood creaks.          

“What is it?” he says again.          

“Sleep with me.”          

Illya drains. 

She tongues her cheek like Solo does. He’s fun to watch; this climb, like red mercury, from zero to blistering.     

“Gaby—”          

“Just on the deck. I don’t mean it like that.”          

“Saying it like this,” he says carefully. “You know what it means.”          

Gaby traces her outstretched fingers up his forearm. His hand twitches, and he glares at Napoleon behind her. She isn’t afraid of him at all. Maybe, with the creaking of warm waxed wood and the cringing of the ropes, she has gotten used to flinching. Like getting used to the constant lapping of waves, she has settled into the ambient movement of him; exposure therapy, having seen the Red Peril laugh and swim and brush his teeth.    

So when she pinches at one of his shirt buttons to pluck him closer, his disapproving intake of breath is barely something to listen out for at all. But she does enjoy it. With a few more of those, she imagines she’ll get used to it as well.    

“What are you doing?”          

“Sit down. All your pacing...” she tuts, his habit. “You’re making me uneasy.”          

Illya sits on the bench. “Nauseous,” he supplies.           

“That too.”           

“Hmm.”          

She studies him. “Will you, then?”          

“You want to sleep outside.”          

“Better out here than in there. So cramped.” She looks him over, root to tip. “You won’t even fit in that bed. We really would have to share it, this time.”      

Illya, likely having considered this at great length, does not react.       

She wants that. Having him curled near her, perhaps around her, if the space required. Which it would. She’d pull his arm over her unmarried waist, cover blown, and tuck him into her, tuck into him. Turn in his space and lie flush against his chest, feel that strange heart flood red and full and prove it all to her, what they say about cold hands.  

But he wouldn’t, and he won’t invite Solo in, loyal hound or not. Illya won’t so much as glance at her if he thinks he might be caught. There’s no chance of a morsel like this slipping under Solo’s eye; he has waited for this as long as they have.   

So she will take Illya and try her best to crack some glass neatly between them, arrange the shards so they won’t cut Solo’s feet.     

He looks away. “You will last ten minutes.”         

“Me? Are we not partners?”         

He glances at Solo again. He doesn’t flare up, so she imagines Napoleon is still pretending to rest, not antagonising him behind her back.          

She turns Illya’s cheek to look at her again, and feels heat in it. Is he blushing?       

Perhaps all of this is cruel.         

He looks at her mouth, his own opening to protest as usual. “You are drunk.”         

“It’s not that.”         

It’s probably that. She traces the arrowhead scar on his temple, feather light. A brisk wind rolls up and scatters his hair a little, though he doesn’t seem to notice anything else but her.          

She’s a thief.         

“Can I?” she asks, hushed. It’s something he’d say. Do I deserve it? Have I earned it? Will you let me?         

To her surprise, after peering indiscreetly over her shoulder, he nods. He nods at her for too long and she thrills all over. His knuckles graze over the grit of the bench, and she’s the one to loom tall for once.          

Gaby leans up on her elbows. She barely meets his cheek from this angle so he rights her, guiding her mouth to his.        

A buried fear returns with the confirmation that he is good, in every sense. Golden, soft. It shakes all her plans through her fingers like sand.  

So she has his mouth on her, but what next? The warmth, his lips dried by sun and salt but unimaginably gentle —  it’s the rarest thing on Earth. She doesn’t want to take it out of him. She has never known anything but the urge to take, take, take, once she can get her hands on it. Only now she wants to push it all back into him, have him keep it close. He keeps so little just for himself.        

Illya lets out a defeated sigh and steals another kiss, another. His palm curves to the nape of her neck. She feels every fingertip as he brushes her hair over her shoulder and she thinks then that she must be asleep already, easy as it is, sinking into the taste, the pressure, the push. He wants it and, in a moment of senseless decadence, he is taking it from her. All three of them thieves. Gaby’s eyes drift closed and roll back a little.           

He parts from her only to kneel up on the bench and press back down. She lies back and loops around his shoulders, his shirt crinkling under her fingers.       

She swears it’s the boat that dizzies her; makes all the blood in her rush and swell from side to side, weightless and drifting, and not the brush of his lips or the small, relieved sighs he peppers her with. Not the slide of his hand down to her waist either, which he firms as if she might fizz out of his grasp like sea foam. She could lose him out here. She could roll him over the deck, over Solo, until they crash through the white railings and into the Aegean.        

She takes his collar to tug him down, breathe him in. He shocks for the small bites she lays into him but she can’t help it. He’s gentler than she is.

“Gaby.”         

“What?” her grip tightens, and he hangs his head.    

His hair smells of saltwater and fresh air. She pushes her kiss there, thinking of him swimming in the lido, thinking of him drinking dark wine, eating salted cheeses and sweet breads and stuffed vine leaves with that soviet frown, and looking at her, always so puzzled. Gripping her elbow as she’d walked the edge of the harbour wall, one foot neatly in front of the other, the sea sparkling and roaring behind her but still he’d only looked at her. Looked at her while she danced with Solo, close and hot and lazy. Looked at her when she entered the room, when she left it, when she returned from her showers and scrunched through her hair.     

After a dreadfully long hesitation, he dares to look at her again. He’s so close his eyes dart, grey-blue. “Now?”   

“Why not?”         

Indulgence. He takes her wrists.         

“Illya, stop thinking.”         

“He is—”        

“So?” she tries. How can he think of anyone else? Looking up, there’s nothing in the world but peachy clouds and Illya, flushed and hunting for a reason not to enjoy her. It prickles her with an embarrassing sting, red and rising. “I don’t care. Let him see.”         

“This is not for him.”         

“For me, then.”         

Her lips burn. Her heart is rabbiting away for him. Is he not helpless for her? His infatuation has always amplified something she feels for him; made him a sweet, safe thing to snap at but always spring back to. Reverent and patient. If he doesn’t want this then surely she would see it in him; in the shake of his hands, some fight between his manners and his repulsion.       

She frowns. Her fingers loosen.        

“You want him here,” he says.           

In fact, she wants Solo on a powerboat with his foot strapped to the accelerator and his hands glued to the wheel.         

She wants to lie in Solo’s lap while he smooths through her hair, and have Illya carry on kissing her as if he isn’t there at all.        

“He can listen,” Illya decides, weighted and final. No touching.         

He unfolds each of her loose fingers like a bouquet, only to curl them back into his shirt and have her warp all his pressed corners and neat lines again.  

Gaby holds on, baffled. Soon he’s lying on the blanket with her, where she has to edge backwards to make room for him. He’s such a size, so close. She’s pressed back into Solo’s side, the changeable wind spraying saltwater in a cool mist against him but finding her too, climbing over his chest to dampen her cheek. She wishes he’d say something. She needs a quip of his, a suggestion, an invitation to lighten it all, but he’s dead silent. Is he truly asleep? How could he be? She daren’t look over her shoulder in case she breaks Illya’s spell.   

But it _had_ only been a dare, a curiosity of hers. Illya is finally touching her and kissing her with no threat to his life to spur him; no cover, no ultimatum, no necessity at all. His hands are everywhere. If Solo was away on a boat of his own, would he be bold? Would he take off her dress? Would he only push it up, roll down with her, cotton bunching up between them like a white flag? Would the wood creak with the arch of her back, or would it bend under his?    

Will he do it now?   

Her need is crushed velvet under her skin. It rubs the wrong way, smooths the right wherever his hand happens to drift. He rests his touch on her waist, drawing her to goosebumps with idle circles of his thumb.       

She wants him all over.      

Then he flinches and throws a glare over her shoulder. He’s a shield, a trench. His grip firms so tightly she can’t turn in his arms. She thumps his chest, and he loosens just a fraction to let her breathe.  

Solo says, “Don’t mind me.”        

Illya’s grumble reverberates over her knuckles. She could shiver. Instead, she takes his face in both hands and kisses him again. He’s still frowning. His touch is numb, distracted.        

“Let him,” Gaby murmurs against his lips, and tries to part them to seek him out.        

“Go inside, Cowboy,” Illya mumbles back.         

She could hit him for it. Throw him overboard.   

“The fresh air is wonderful, and it really is very cramped in there,” Solo says. “You were right, Gaby.”        

So he’d been listening. Something burns up in her for it. Something low, dark, warm. 

She pushes her sole into the back of Illya’s thigh to take it between hers, twists in the lock of his arms to glance behind her. “I’m always right.”        

Solo looks. He raises his brow at Illya with a curious little smirk, daring him. Sometimes it seems he wants to lose all his teeth.  

So she sinks back into Illya’s neck, kissing him where he’s craning to stare at Solo instead of her. He mutters something mutinous, but tentatively cups the back of her head to hold her there. She likes that. She likes the way his shoulder blades flex into her touch, the weight rolling in waves under her fingers. She likes this.      

She pulls out Illya’s shirt, sneaks along his bare waist. He pulls her in even closer. Is this how he works? By degrees? Move by calculated move, as if she’s a chess piece? White queen in her white dress, but only one step at a time. A pawn, then; on, on, on, until she takes an oblique step at last to knock an intruder off the board. Is this his game?   

She wonders if he wants Solo jealous. Wonders if he wants Solo.        

Gaby takes his anchoring hand from her back to splay it over her thigh.    

He ducks to kiss her again, ignoring their shadow to admit to her, “I have wanted this for a long time.”        

She’s a little helpless for hearing it on him. “Then what kept you?”        

Illya smiles gently.        

“Louder for those in the back,” Solo says.       

“Cowboy—”         

Gaby pulls Illya’s mouth back to her. “Why now?” she echoes him, whispering. She spreads all her fingers over the tension in his shoulders; tightening for Solo’s heckling, for what she might do to him next. “In that schwül little hotel room, are you joking? Of course here, of course now.”

“He is looking.”      

“I don’t care.” She hooks her thigh tighter over him, pulls him in closer and closer. “You can touch me, Illya.”

He hangs his head again, staring at her wrapped around him. “You…”      

She nods. The planks pluck and spring under Solo’s body but she pays him little mind. With Illya’s palm smoothing from the outside of her thigh to in between, it’s impossible to consider anything else. But he doesn’t move, his roaming hands boyish in another fashion; clumsy, reluctant to start.

He sighs into her neck. “Have him do something. Send him away. Please.” 

She looks back for Napoleon. As if she’d clicked her fingers, he meets her eye expectantly. “Come here.”      

“Gaby—” Illya starts. She toys with the back of his hair, spiralling her fingertips there. She softens under his breath warming down her neck.      

“Come here, Solo,” she manages.   

He doesn’t move.      

Illya does. She wraps an arm tightly over his back to keep him there.   

Daring to peer behind her, she finds Napoleon on his side and measuring them with a tailor’s eye; appreciative, sceptical. He eclipses what’s left of the sun. She wonders whom he finds more intimidating; if a twist of the two of them is a nightmare or a dream to him.    

“He wants you,” Illya mutters in her ear.    

Gaby glares at him. “So?” she manages, because she can’t fathom anything else. She can feel Solo at her back like sun-heat. “What of it?”    

Illya’s hand strokes between her shoulders, twists into her hair.     

“He wants you, too,” she mumbles under him.   

“Hm.” Illya kisses her to bury it. “No.”   

“I think so, yes.” She ponders for a while, biting her lip so he can’t get at it again. “He cares for you. Perfectly natural.” She waits for Solo to touch her. “He’s very good.”   

“No.”   

She rolls back into Illya’s fingers between her shoulder blades, the enveloping wrap of his arm over her body, covering her up and leaning in. He’s taking what he’s refused her all week; kisses to the mouth, her neck, his hands on her where Solo can’t see.    

Solo, who hasn’t said a word.    

Illya is comforted by his absence. He drifts under her dress, circling over her thigh and the ticklish dip there, playing with the twist of her bikini. She sighs, pulls him quickly into her neck. She feels the swill of her drink fully now, a narcotic sinking in. Her legs thrum with it, her fingers aching to touch.    

And then the blanket is covering her shoulders. All her goosebumps settle, shielded from the sea wind she has been too stubborn to complain about — the last thing Illya needs is more confirmation of being right. He tucks the blanket in behind her and the tenderness continues, stroking down her back to the leg curling over him, pulling her closer by the thigh and kissing her shoulder. He noses along the neckline of her dress.   

Gaby toys with his waistband, slipping beneath.  

He freezes and covers her wrist.    

“Relax,” she says, but she’s giddy herself. She’s thrilled to the bones. If anybody took a look inside her she’d be nothing but jelly and snapping sparks, blue-white and hissing while all her muscles jump under his hands.

"You want this,” he says slowly, not quite a question. “This is you, not some… objective?”   

“An objective?”  

Of course. When had she forgotten what they were?   

“I would not do this if it had been my order,” he says. “Not to you.”    

She has read Illya’s file. She’d gotten her hands on it before they’d met, just as he had hers, though there had been far more redaction than text. Of course Illya would take this seriously. She knows his feelings about women; his hands behind his back, his ducked head and shrinking in to avoid behaving like men he’s seen before. His mother, and how he’d felt complicit in her favours — she’d given up her dignity to protect him, hadn’t she? He sees this as some immeasurable sacrifice. He sees Solo’s sexual proclivities as his cruelest form of theft.   

There’s that shell he’s been building around her, Gaby thinks; postponing the inevitable if he were ever to touch her. As if he’s ruinous, as if touching is a crime. He’s a pillar of guilt from top to bottom. No wonder he handles her like rice paper.   

“I want this,” she says, and like that it’s not a game anymore. “You think I would do this to trick you? That Waverly put me up to this?”   

Illya holds something in. Perhaps accusation that she has done it before. He looks down the blanket, the two of them tangled up and hidden in plain sight. He looks at Solo, half-forgotten. He would be staring at his hands if he could see them, she thinks, so she covers one of them on her thigh and squeezes hard.   

“We are only kissing,” she reminds him.   

He nods for too long.    

“Do you want to stop?”   

“No.”   

“Then stop thinking,” Gaby says, and brushes over the cut of his hips, his stomach. “Say when.”   

“Cry uncle,” Solo supplies, sleepily, and she lights up. She reaches back to take his arm from behind his head and sneak it under the blanket. He lets her. No resistance, no contribution. He only follows. She can feel the little quirk on his lips, the bemused furrow of his brow without having to look at him. He must find comfort in knowing Illya’s swing would have to go through her first.    

She bravely pulls him in and in and in, until Illya’s attempt to shield her with a blanket is long gone. They’re all under it now, the deck hard and dreadfully uncomfortable without it.    

Napoleon curves carefully behind her, arm pulled over her waist like another dance.  

She hums, satisfied and warming up, and returns to Illya with gentling kisses, trying to draw the steel in his glare back to soft and molten. It takes a while, but he does close his eyes. His lips do part to take hers, and his hands do sweep back under her dress to brush low over her stomach, trace the line of her bikini and cup her hip — only inches away from Solo’s at her waist — and she does shiver for it.  

When Napoleon’s grip firms she rolls into it, and she edges back to close the gap between them. She doesn’t need to open her eyes to feel Illya staring over her head, or to sense Napoleon communicating with him.    

She touches Illya to bring him back. He huffs, guides his hand between her legs to return the favour, caught between guilt and shame, desire. She wishes he’d give in. It is very much him in there, apologising for taking what is being offered freely to him. He’s careful, good.    

Solo, who plays with the concealed zip down the line of her back, is bad. He twists the pull between his thumb and forefinger, flattens his palm to her again to trace down her side, and then all the way back up.    

Gaby could melt. Illya was right, the cold is creeping in with the sinking of the sun, but under her skin she is anything but cool. She’s burning up, sparking now where Illya searches for her with purpose and rolls his touch to earn some confirmation, some encouragement. She swallows, cups his face to sigh into him, nod against him, tilt her hips to guide him. It takes everything she has, but the drink helps; she circles his wrist and guides him into her bikini, and she tries to lose herself in his careful kisses before she can think too hard on it.   

He shifts. Illya shifts and he clears his throat, and something like an apology falls out of him. She reels it over and over in her head. It’s hushed, but it’s certainly Russian, and she knows her basic vocabulary.    

She nods. “It’s okay.”   

He nods back, looks down.    

She pats Solo’s hand on the zip of her dress. That seems to be enough. The pull inches down to the small of her back, and his warm hand slips in to curve flush over her bare waist, her ribs. She’s drunk on it. On the gin, the fear, the ease. No going back now. Illya touches her with a deft care, much the same way Solo might crack a safe; listening to her, feeling for the give and circling when he meets the right degree. 

A long-held breath tears out of her, a little squeak and a sigh. They both draw up and in, a movement they share like loosening their ties, like clearing their throats. She should be embarrassed. She should be mortified. With anyone else, she would be. But they wouldn't be here if they didn’t want to be.   

Illya pushes a hand to her back, and like that he finds that her dress is open, and he knows then what Solo has done. She prepares for the worst but, after only the briefest pause, he pushes the dress down her shoulder and kisses her just beneath her collarbone, gentle and calm. 

Gaby is sure, under the sway of the boat, the slap of water, the creak of all three of them on the deck, that he’s whispering to Solo under his breath. Russian again, something further out of her grasp. Whatever he says, Solo’s hand lowers through the opening of her dress in return, to run his fingers over her thigh while Illya strokes between them.  

She drops her head against Illya’s warm chest, lets out a nervous laugh of disbelief.   

Napoleon kisses the nape of her neck and she shivers.  

Too much, too much.  

“What did you say?” she asks Illya, mindless. Her voice sounds odd on her. Weak and far away.  

“That he should touch you.”  

Gaby stretches, his fingers circling a little firmer. “You’ve changed your tune.”  

“It is what you want.”  

The longer she goes without confirming it, the lighter Solo’s touch becomes.  “You have no idea what I want,” she says, to keep them both there. 

“Are we not partners?” 

Solo scoffs. 

“It’s what you want,” she snipes back, palming him through his slacks until he jumps. “Solo just can’t help himself.”  

Napoleon squeezes her thigh. “I object to that.”  

But Illya interrupts with a groan for her touch, caught between bucking up and ducking away.  

She straightens up for the sound of it, and Solo follows her, his kisses over her neck spreading open and hot. Soon he meets the soft stretch under her ear, and she feels his teeth, his grin as Illya moans again.  

“Loosening up, Peril?” he murmurs there. Gaby squirms into it.  

“Shut up.” 

Gaby leaves Illya cold to lace her fingers behind his neck instead, pull him down to kiss him while he works her, pressure building until nothing else matters. She almost swats Solo off her for distracting them, but his work is just as good.  

Her knuckles ache for tightening her fingers, desperate not to thrash when Illya meets her somewhere perfect, stays there, burning her up with a faultless rhythm. Where did he learn it? Who? How? She thanks them, thanks them a thousand times.  

How careless of her to be here now.  

How stupid of her to have postponed it for as long as she has.  

Illya murmurs something else unintelligible over her head and Solo quips back, his accent sneaking in to bastardise it and so butchered that even Gaby notices.   

“Stop that,” she manages.  

Illya’s hand freezes.  

“Not that! My god.” She grabs his forearm and pushes down. “My god, Illya, don’t— don’t do that again.” 

He smiles at her, and Solo’s huff of a laugh sails over the shell of her ear, spiking goosebumps in her from head to toe.  

She could kill them both.   

Only then Illya goes on, his fingertips rubbing pinpoint perfect, and Gaby squeezes her eyes shut to forget everything else.  

Solo’s hand rounds over her hip in hypnotic little circles, rolling her lower and lower. The draw is too much, and even Illya’s breath is catching – what must she look like now, sound like, if every time she catches herself moaning he lets one out for himself? A hum or two, mumbling over her skin with a deep rumble she’d kill to have all over her.  

Illya pushes up her dress to see for himself, and there it is, her death warrant. Solo’s hand is covering Illya’s so completely that she sees the stretch of every muscle, every working tendon to keep up. He presses in, guiding Illya with the rhythm and weight she needs — when had his hand left her body? Has he been doing it all along? Was he the one to teach Illya this?  

Is this Solo’s game?  

She stretches back to kiss him, not thinking, not for a moment comprehending how stupid it is. She meets his open mouth, a mouth she has looked at hungrily, has loathed what falls out of it, and has always wondered what all the fuss is about. There’s that fear she has been looking for. A little healthy hesitance. Sincerely alarmed for a very satisfying millisecond before he falls into step; slips back into the mask to perform, to impress her with a kiss that leaves her craving, deeply in trouble of wanting it again and again. She tastes the olive, the Campari, the salt, his tongue, and he’s very good. 

Soon their hands on her spread apart, with Illya slipping in and Solo knowing better than to stop circling while she’s close. The slow pulse inside, the quick spiral rising and coiling up — Gaby’s cut off cry is open and needing, so Illya kisses her. Teeth, gasps, a wave in her body that the sea can’t rival.  

She thinks there might be water pooling in the corners of her eyes, frustrated and close and holding her breath. She straightens her legs and snaps them back in, curling her fist in Illya’s shirt and pulling, pulling, down and in. It draws her to a peak until a gasp sighs out of her, and all the heat gathering up inside bubbles over, spreading and warming every limb.  

Solo knows exactly what to do. He slowly soothes and kisses what he can of her before smoothing over her hips, her thighs, and then leaving her be.  

Illya is hypnotised. When she blearily opens her eyes to check on him, his are wide and blown, the dark of his pupils drinking up all the blue, just as the night has swallowed up the sea. How she can see him at all is a mystery, with how dark it has fallen in no time at all. He’s like a buoy bobbing about out here in the dark; a barrier, an authority, but looking a little lost all the same.  

Gaby catches her breath. Illya’s touch slips away, heavily missed. She has to cross her legs to make up for it. He plucks at her bikini to right her, to set her back up, and he wipes his hand on his thigh. He is completely taken. He won’t stop staring at her, that hand coming up to hesitate a brush over her bare arm, tuck her hair back to its rightful place and just look, and look, and look. 

She can’t help it. Gaby smiles at him, drunk on just about everything. Fresh air, gin, his mouth, Solo’s mouth, their hands, their bodies, as tired as her own and at least one of which is left completely unfinished. What will they let her do about that? 

Solo zips up her dress, adjusts the hem, her neckline. She pushes down any shred of embarrassment lingering in his care; his correcting her modesty as if she’d lost it along the way. It’s something Illya would have done, were he of sound mind and composure. Now Illya is only roaming with question over her waist, marvelling. 

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she says, and notices how dry her mouth has become.  

Illya nods. 

“If you’ll excuse me a moment,” Solo says, and gets up. He brushes down his trousers, re-rolls his sleeves to the elbow.

He catches Gaby’s lingering eye and he smiles at her, shallow, and she sees all the cracks in his veneer no matter how thickly the dark has masked it. He’s gone soft. She’s known it all along. It's in him, underneath, this sincere fondness for anything in his life that comes close to a constant. He’d had the choice to lie with them and soak in the quiet of the boat, the sea at night, the slowing of their heartbeats, and he’d chosen to flee. To leave is to admit defeat, but to stay is to risk falling deeper, the care in him blooming deep red with every minute of companionable quiet, of having all three of them admit that they want to do this again and again.

Gaby watches him go, certain he’s glad for the cover of dark. His stroll down the steps to disappear into the cabin is choreographed, only slightly out of practice.    

She isn’t convinced Illya has blinked yet. “What’s the matter?”  

“Did you enjoy it?” he asks.  

“Well, what do you think?”  

Nerves flit about in her chest. Sea sickness. It feels like it. The raw wind skitters over the wood and the mast creaks. The shallow waves clap. She had forgotten everything beyond that stretch of deck, far smaller than thirty-six feet to her now, with how the world had shrunk in on itself while she grew dizzy, moaned aloud for them both out here, where no-one else could hear her.   

Illya pushes a long-held kiss to her forehead. 

“You’re good.”  

He hums. He flattens his palm to her arm, rubbing over the goosebumps, the chill. “And you are cold.”  

Gaby rolls her eyes.  

“In,” he says, and pats her hip.   

She tugs his retreating hand to curve over her again, wanting to see him helpless. “And what about you?”  

Illya tears his gaze away to look at the cabin door.   

“In,” she echoes, quietly.  

“Yes.”  

Gaby stifles a grin as bright and wide as the moon.  

“Alright,” she says, coolly. She gathers up the blanket, avoiding his wry smile, his invitation to help her up. She gets to her knees to stand on her own two feet. 

Illya braces her elbow before she can finish staggering.    

“The boat,” she murmurs, and flops her hand from side to side. "The drink."

“Of course."

He's peering down at her with a fond little look, perhaps just a little smug. How different he looks, now that the sun's down and he's not filled to the brim with fear and nerves. She can only see him in the light of the moon and the gentle orange glow from the boat's kitchen, the tiny circular window warming him from toe to tip.

She holds her hands by her sides, wanting very much to smooth over his shoulders and push him back down, carry on. A cool wind slips around him and prickles her arms, and she thinks of that tiny bed, the two of them — the three of them — curled in it, finally keen for the warmth they've been trying to escape all week. What next? Who next, and how? They're temporary. So temporary. So why does this feel far more like a beginning than an end?

She invites Illya to take the steps first, so she can settle her hands on his shoulders and follow him down, down, down. 

There, he takes to one knee to pick the lock.  

“Illya,” she says, because she likes to, and gentles her hand along the back of his neck. “I don’t think he has quite finished in there.”  

“Good," Illya murmurs, and he pushes opens the door.  

   

  

 

**Author's Note:**

> me: "I want to keep these soundscape pieces 1-2k at a time"  
> me: "8k, no problemmo."
> 
> APOLOGIES. I got a little carried away! This just... blew up. Totally unnecessary and 100% hedonistic on my part!! And also took far longer to write than anticipated (almost entirely edited during my lunch breaks at work and often forgotten thereafter!!), so sorry for the absence! I have missed reading about these idiots, from which I usually refrain while writing!! Can't wait to catch up with everything you've all posted in the past month!!
> 
> As usual, thanks very much for reading :)


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